OS Selector & Vista Multiboot

Prior to installing OS Selector my developer machine had several XP, one Win Server 2003, and 2 Vista OSs, all booting from small active FAT (Disk 1-1) with no OS of its own. After OS Selector, all but Vista boot directly from Selector. Of the 2 "Unknown OS" selections also available, the first returns me to the old Vista multi-boot selector. (The other just fails.)

I have tried to mark both Vista OSs as bootable, but am told by Selector they are not. I assume I may need to copy some files from the FAT to make them so, presumably from the FAT's hidden BOOT directory. But what files and how to place them on Vista OSs?

Or is there another way?

Also, is there any way to get rid of the unnecessary "(English)" notation appended to name of each OS in Selector?

I can not offer any specific help, but I have read of many problems once OSS comes through with it's auto opSys detection. If you are knowlegable enough to disk edit and copy FAT tables, I would "deactivate" OSS and try to get back what you had.

Why in the world did you run OSS on a computer that had 5 opSys booting successfully on it?

>Also, is there any way to get rid of the unnecessary "(English)" notation >appended to name of each OS in Selector?

In OSS If you Right click on the Operating System on the right hand side, you will get a menu where you can Rename.

I have no real problem (everything does boot), but was just looking for more convenience. Tired of having 2 Vista installs that were identically described in Vista's text menu, plus need to go back and forth between the set of Vista choices and the so-called Legacy set of choices.

http://www.vistabootpro.org/, mentioned in a May 31 reply this forum, solved the identical descriptions. Can't fathom why Microsoft failed to have this feature.

Removal of (English) works fine in OSS program running in XP, it just didn't seem to work while running OSS before boot selection.

Now if I could just get OSS to actually boot the 2 Vistas rather than just take me to the text menu, all would be fine. Tried copying files mentioned in other posts, but no go. Probably because I install nearly every OS in logical partition, rather than being limited to 4 primary per drive.

OSS does a bad job of detecting multiple OS's if they're setup in some kind of multi-boot setup before installing OSS. Since OSS provides no way to "manually" setup OS's, there is no easy way to fix your problem.

If you have any expierence editing XML files or just want to try it, you can try editing the bootwiz.oss file (located in the BOOTWIZ folder in the partition OSS is installed on). The menu items are there along with all the options. This allows you to "fix" things when the "automatic" features don't work. Make a backup before making changes so you can get the original file back if necessary.

Having all the OS's boot from a single partition is the root of the problem for OSS. It does a better job on isolated installs. And, yes, the logical partitions may also be part of the problem. When Windows is installed on a logical drive, the booting portion must be on a primary/active partition (in this case, your small FAT partition). OSS can't boot the logical directly to Windows and all the boot files are mixed up in the FAT partition.

If you haven't already, you might check and make sure you have the latest build of DD/OSS (2,160) and that when you boot the OSS build is 2,160. In some cases (depending on how it was installed) the version you're using in Windows may be different than the one that boots. (I had this happen during a series of test installs I was performing with OSS and Vista.)